Around about now, boffins will be eagerly awaiting news that protons are finding their way fully around the 27km circuit of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the latest and best atom-smasher particle accelerator - and the biggest scientific experimental apparatus ever built.
This 10 September 2008 project milestone has captivated …

Engineering

This machine is an incredible feat of engineering, and perhaps the single most inspirational thing man has done so far this century. I hope the relevant people can do the sensible thing and use this as a way of making science more popular in schools and colleges. Maybe that's too much to ask.

Did you know that the chamber containing the ATLAS detector is so massive (35m high) that it actually has buoyancy in the Earth's crust?! It rises at a rate of 0.02mm per year, and so the floor had to be set to a 5m thickness to prevent warping.

I'm a bit of an LHC geek, despite having only a basic grasp of the physics...

I was sure that Bosons were.....

nearly exterminated by Buffalo Bill; were something navel or naval I forget which, were too small to figure much in the cosmos that is my World.

This article is confusing and makes one point: We don't really know what's going on so lets smash some more rocks together and see what sticks to the flag-pole or some other trite trash pandered as scientific research. Sounds like a candidate for the Darwin Awards along the lines of Russian roulette using an automatic pistol....

Mine is the one with the logo - 'We're Doomed'

PS do the Taliban know and are there enough virgins for all of them turning up at the same time?

Higgs Boson is Coming

and he's going to kill everyone at CERN sometime in late 2009 or early 2010. After several decades of looking and not finding you'd think those smartypants over at CERN would give the chap some privacy - alas no. When the LHC fires up, and they are certain of its capabilities you can bet your sweet ass CERN is going to ransom the world: Come out Boson, or we're going to destroy the planet.

Well, maybe not, but that's what I told the jackasses over at http://www.lhcconcerns.com

One of the best geek/psycho/religious baiting experiences in years. Everyone should visit that site; if for nothing other than to marvel at humans and their understanding of science.

It's The End of the World As We Have Not Know It

This new atom smasher will allow us (yes, we are in this deal together) to see things that we could not see before. A principle of problem solving: When you can see enough of the problem, a solution will show itself. Thus, I hope solutions will show themselves.

It's not all about particles. There is a structure to our universe. There is energy, there is a flux between our 4-space and that which is outside of our 4-space. We have much to learn and it's going to be exciting.

I don't know whether the Higgs Boson exists but it really doesn't matter (ha ha.) It's about gravity. Gravity. What is gravity? Is it a property of matter or is it an interaction with our universe or just what is it? Can it be worked with? Yes, it can. There is a relation between electromagnetics and gravity.

Well, I would tell more but I don't want to alert the black helicopters and have them come empty out The Reg offices.

Disturbing yet liberating revelation

There is a leaked video on You Tube from CERN (LHC Black hole simulation Large Hadron Collider CERN) there is more to this than meets the eye, the black hole is not the concern, it is the revelation that may shatter our perception of reality.

The link is on http://godparticle.net which has insight into the revelation. Do you really think they would spend 6 billion dollars just to find a particle?

I knew it

Now is the time....

Most odd. If they wanted evidence of a black hole then they would just need to take a close look at Labours spending plans. However, today is the day to max out your credit cards because the bailiffs won't be popping round to relieve you of your Mary Poppins films. And do something you have always wanted to do today because there's no chance you'll have the opportunity tomorrow.

Wouldn't it be funny (not) if we all woke up tomorrow morning and a corner of France had been turned into a glass dish?

Paris because there is no icon of Britney to choose, and Paris is about as close as I can get.

Uneccessary use of ^H there?

Despite the boffins getting shirty, I reckon "atom smasher" is probably a more accurate description for the whole assemblage.

After all, while the speed you can get yer proton up to in the accelerator part is important to the process and of technical interest, the really interesting bit and the whole purpose of the exercise is what happens when you ram it into something else while it's going at full pelt.

Well, well....

Don't take their word for it...

I mean, if Prof Hawking is wrong, and black holes don't evaporate, it would be a Very Bad Thing.

But you don't have to trust a bunch of gruyere-munching über-nerds - you can check it out yourself. The entire documentation for the LHC is available online: http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/-page=extra.lhc/jinst

Now I happen to have a few bits left over from a radical hard-tail chopper project in the shed, and I've built my own. And just to reassure you all, I'm going to whack a few protons together at 10^20 TeV.

I already found the Higgs Boson

It was in the footwell of my car on the passenger side, buried under M6 Toll receipts and empty cigarette packets. To be fair, my wife found it, after tidying the car up a bit. She almost missed it too - it's pretty small. 180 GeV sounds like a lot but it really isn't. It nearly got thrown out with the rubbish.

They're all looking in the wrong place - Tom Stoppard knows the answer...

BIRDBOOT Where's Higgs?

MOON I replace him tonight.

MOON AND BIRDBOOT Where's Higgs?

MOON Every time.

BIRDBOOT What?

MOON It is as if we only existed one at a time, never appearing together but combining to achieve continuity. I keep space warm for Higgs. My presence defines his absence, his absence explains my presence, his presence excludes mine....When Higgs and I walk down this aisle together to claim our common seat, the oceans will fall into the sky and the trees will hang with fishes.

BIRDBOOT [He has not been paying attention, looking around vaguely, now catches up] Where's Higgs?

MOON Seeing me with a critic's ticket is enough. The streets are impassable tonight, you know why? It's because the country is rising and the cry goes up from hill to hill --Where--is--Higgs? [Small pause] Perhaps he's dead at last, or trapped in an elevator somewhere, or succumbed to amnesia, wandering the land with his pockets stuffed with ticket. [BIRDBOOT regards him doubtfully for a moment.]

Oh Dear

@Colonel Panic

I thought the same yesterday when I read that Hawking had said he 'wasn't holding his breath' that he'd be proven right about Hawking radiation. I'm hoping that's just because he expects them to observe nothing evaporating and not because he expects to be pulled wheels first to Geneva.

And kudos el Reg for getting the facts right - the beeb keep trying to say they'll be colliding things today. How hard is it for them to get their facts straight - or is getting a beam of protons to circulate a 70km ring consisting of 2000 superconducting magnets first time just not awesome enough for them?

I feel the earth move under my feet, I see the sky tumbling down...

Don't worry

Don't worry fellow humans, I'm a time traveler from 2343 a.d. and I just wanted the worried people out there to know that this experiment is harmless. After eight months in operation, a new exotic particle will be found (no, not Higgs Boson, which BTW, doesn't really exist). No black holes whatsoever, at least not right now (these were created and destroyed in lab for the first time in 2157 a.d., and all went well too). BTW, instead of wasting so much time in theoretical physics, just conjuring theories, you might want to change your approach and worry more about direct observations of reality instead of theorizations. Also, you should revise some misconcepts that you have, specially some very basic ones about how electricity works and the relationship between magnetism and "gravity" (or as we call it today, "graviticity"). A hint:study the stuff that Edward Leedskalnin has left behind, and no, his "Sweet Sixteen" is not a girl, it's a symbolic reference to the key concept in electrodynamics.

That's as much as I can say without changing the future... or making it too easy =)

Burkhard Heim

@Oh Dear

Re the BBC"Big Bang Machine": my 6 year old daughter was upset yesterday, and didn't want to go to school as she thought the world was going to end. We had to tell her a little white lie that the experiment had already happened. Her response was "Oh yes, I remember, everything went small". Perhaps she knows something we don't!?!

Re: I feel the earth move under my feet, I see the sky tumbling down...

I'm confused

Nothing can go faster than the speed of light, right? So I'm a proton whizzing round this circular tunnel at nearly the speed of light. Without warning I spot a fellow proton whizzing round in an opposite direction doing the same speed. And it's coming straight at me.

So the closing speed is nearly twice the speed of light? That's impossible!

re: Don't Worry

"you might want to change your approach and worry more about direct observations of reality instead of theorizations."

Uh, so we should stop just theorising about what may be the cause of inertial mass and build something so we can SEE a particle that could cause MASS but be undetectable because it is of such high energy it cannot exist except as a virtual particle?

OK.

I suggest we engineer something where we can get the energy concentration necessary to make these virtual particles exist for a detectible amount of time. This is probably best done by putting kinetic energy into particles and then getting them dense enough to create the right conditions.

To make them steerable, we should chose a charged particle. Protons maybe. Some sort of charged hadron anyway.

And if we shoot them about in opposite directions when the occasional one wollops into another one, the energy density should therefore be enough for our purposes.

Since this will be expensive, we need several countries involved. Best, from a political standpoint, to put the device in a suitably inoffensive "neutral" country with borders near to lots of other countries, so they all feel like they get involved. Switzerland should do. And CERN could work it, after all, they have some experience.

element 115, anybody ???

Some of us know that the true purpose of this endeavor is to create new compounds which do not naturally occur in our space neighborhood- such as element 115, the product of a binary star system (beta 1 & 2 reticuli ). This element was pointed out by robert lazar, who encountered it while back-engineering an exotic aerial craft at groom lake, nevada. These types of pursuits are what fuels such projects which exist on the fringes of science fiction & reality !!!

@ Andrew - 'Nothing can go faster than the speed of light'

Einstein solved that one - he analyzed the inconsistency and ended up with the famous e=mc^2 (energy equals mass times speed of light squared) equation. Basically subjective time for the protons 'slows down' so that they 'see' the other proton approaching at less than the speed of light. Read up on special relativity if you want to more details...

We need more beer!

@Andrew

"Nothing can go faster than the speed of light, right?"

Theoretically; Einstein argued that as you approach the speed of light, mass increases towards infinity, so it shoudn't be possible to exceed it. However, (from memory about 15 years ago) there were some previous experiments that suggested that the Universe doesn't give a fig for Einstein!

"So the closing speed is nearly twice the speed of light? That's impossible!"

No; the closing speed is a comparison, not an actual speed. You could equally argue that as they are travelling in a circle, they are also actually travelling apart at twice the speed of sound which would cancel out the closing speed (it doesn't - that's a joke!)

Credit where credit's due....

Has anyone noticed how the Wackypedia stresses that a Japanese scientist who webt to an AMERICAN university ALSO thought about the Higgs Boson?

And that Higgs' was "working FROM the ideas of" an AMERICAN scientist (and presumably also from Newton's, eventually). Furthermore some AMERICANS were the first to apply the Higgs mechanism to the electroweak theory.

Begging the question ...

As even bright people now routinely (mis)use 'begging the question' to mean 'raising the question' what, pray, may we use to replace it? 'Undermining one's own logical argument by assuming the point at issue' doesn't have the same ring to it.

Big Bang balloney

While the experiment is impressive, it will say nothing about the Big Bang. The large hadron collider produces a collision between "light-weight" subatomic particles. The Big Bang was an explosion of ultradense material.

It's like two cars colliding, and claiming you figure you the origins of civilization from the wreckage.

@Alastair Smith

"Did you know that the chamber containing the ATLAS detector is so massive (35m high) that it actually has buoyancy in the Earth's crust?!"

Errrm, massive means that it has a lot of mass, ie it is very heavy. The reason that the chamber is buoyant is because it weighs less per volume (ie is less dense) than the surrounding earth/rock -- ie it is NOT masssive.

I assume that rather than "massive" you meant "big". Nitpicking ? Maybe: but we are talking about a physics experiment.

The Huggs Bossom..

How on earth will Doc Emmett Brown fit this contraption into the DeLorean time machine? In essence it is an oversized Flux Capacitor used to move matter around at light speed and cause two particles (Marty McFly & Biff) to collide!

Our first chance...

Would it not be better........

..... to have some super-rich, uber geek (with initials BG ?) use all his hard-earned cash to develop our very own Deep Thought (that's the Douglas Addams one, not the sad IBM effort), and then Deep Thought can produce all the answers without us mere mortals putting our whole existence on the line by (possibly) generating black holes in an atom-smasher ?

re: I'm confused

this would be because your assertion is wrong.

The closing speed of two particles traveling at nearly the speed of light is even nearer the speed of light. If you take as "closing speed" the speed of the other particle from the point of view of one of the colliding particles.

If you're talking about from the point of view of the rest frame of the experiment, one particle is moving at speed of light going one way and the other is moving at the speed of light the other way. I.e. they are going at nearly light speed toward each other.

Hog's Bison: The Guardian explains it all quite well...

"27km large haddock collider smashes barnacles together at 47 times the speed of matter, recreating conditions last seen shortly after Big Ben. Heat and pressure combine to create Cod particle, also known as Hog’s bison."

Full version here: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2008/09/10/cern_G2_cover.pdf

Professional cynic

"Look beyond the headlines, and questions begin to pile up."

Nice to see El Reg continuing the "scientists are all trying to pull the wool over our eyes" agenda.

Any good physics school teacher will gladly tell their A-Level pupils (if not for even younger pupils) about the failings of modern particle physics, QM and Relativity. If you study Physics at University you can't escape it. The fact that the Standard Model has serious problems is the least well kept secret in the whole of science - it's hardly the fault of the particle physicists that most people (inc. journalists) are idiotic buffoons with the scientific aptitude of a warm cup of tea.

Put it this way - this experiment will not reveal the mysteries of the universe, but if we want human colonies on far away worlds, then pinning down the Higgs Boson (if it even exists) is as necessary a step as that of Newton realising that gravity was a deterministic force acting between lumps of matter.

New physics - poor SF writers...

Faster than light

Sorry to nit pick but E=mc^2 doesn't say "nothing can travel faster than the speed of light".

What it says is for a body of mass to accelerate to the speed of light either requires an infinite amount of energy in a finite amount of time, or a finite amount of energy in an infinite amount of time. As time (at the moment) is purely a relativistic concept this isn't precluded.

Additionally, there is nothing that prevents a body of mass ALWAYS having traveled at superluminal speeds.

Finally the groups velocity of light waves have already experimentally been made to travel faster than light.

Personally, I hope they don't find the Higgs, it's a horribly inelegant theory and it will be far more exciting if they don't.

I helped build some of the earlier CERN high energy magic machines..

It was nice to hear the SPS getting a mention on radio4 this am, nobody reminded us how the LEP - large electron positron 27km biggest experiment since...yes, you've heard it, anyway how LEP couldn't circulate a beam at first try as some joker had stuffed an empty beer bottle up the vacuum tube! I presume LHC had an obstacle patrol!

I once dumped n x 10^9 antiprotons at 3.5GeV/c into the wrong place, wasn't no black holes that I noticed, but it did snow a lot that year!

@Neil Stansbury

You are so wrong on so many levels... The Higgs mechanism may seem convoluted, but its the simplest theory thats fits observations 'so far!' That's the whole point of the LHC to settle this, one way or another...

I never thought I’d see a resonance cascade, let alone cause one!

Good article, I liked it. Also, the links to Field Propulsion were nice, though I had to look up “circumferential”. I must say, as a layman, having three independent experiments that all measure an artificial gravity field orders of magnitude greater than can be predicted by general relativity is quite exiting. I hope they continue to progress.

As for the LHC, well some peoples reactions over at lhcconcerns just makes me think that science is not being taught very well in our schools. Hell, they scare me more than the totally improbable chance that LHC will produce a stable black hole or spark another big bang. I mean, people going “There are some things that must remain a mystery” is just freaky, if everyone had that attitude, then we’d still be living in caves.

History is littered with mouth breathers like them. The first passenger trains got created and you had people who insisted that going over 30mph would asphyxiate the passengers. Or how about people who thought that the detonation of a nuclear bomb above ground would cause the atmosphere to ignite, incinerating all life on the planet?

We have observed “jets” being emitted from the poles of other galaxies. Currently, we think that these are partials being ejected by the magnetic field of a super massive black hole that’s in a feeding stage. We think these particles are travelling at near the speed of light. So how come, when they hit something they don’t seem to produce a black hole or a new big bang? After all, they have far more energy than can be produced by LHC.

All this scaremongering is about a valid as people getting scared of Dihydrogen monoxide.

Hope the LHC team find some interesting stuff though. It would be a shame if all that money was spent and nothing new was found. Mind you, given the nature of an experiment failure to find something is still a result.

E=mc^2

Unless I missed some recent newsbreaking update from our dearly departed Einstein, he said nothing about E=mc^2 having anything to do with how fast something can move. E=mc^2 is only an explanation of how much energy a mass contains if the entire mass is converted is a loss less manner into energy.

I think what you're looking for is the relativistic mass formula: mrel = m0/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)

This is part of special relativity, as implied by many others above. It says that the relative mass is increased as the mass' velocity increases. If v == c then you get a divide by 0 error; this can be treated as infinite (since that is what the limit as v approaches c is), or it could be seen as a special case not covered by the formula.

re: Bryce Prewitt

If your wondering why SETI can't find extraterrestrial life

Maybe they should try boosting their reception on signals in the digital television spectrum to find the sad final moments of our noble alien neighbors at the height of their hubris? I can see it now:

"This is Xeenathean News Network science correspondent Browarjemenq Nprinwed coming to you live from the opening ceremony of the brand-new Beam Fusion Directorate. The atmosphere here in the BFD control room is one of pure excitement as Supreme Overlord Lweyintokl is set to press the shiny red button that will start the first full power experiment and usher in a new age of understanding of our universe. The Supreme Overlord is stepping up to the control panel and he's reaching for the button! You can hear the beam generat...."

@ Anon John

Five hours to Mars, and you have to spend one and a half times that long clearing Customs, getting your insides sterilized (we can't pollute another planet with our germs), and getting x-rayed for terrorist paraphernalia. Oh, and then there are the lines.. So big deal!

@Andrew

Nothing with mass can go the speed of light, and massless particles can not (supposedly) go any faster. However, as a particle with mass approaches the speed of light, its mass increases, to infinity the closer it gets to C. This is what prevents it from achieving light speed. As the mass increases, so does the particle's kinetic energy, which is what ultimately makes the collision more powerful (like two semis vs. two compact cars), and what yields the bizarre collision products that are hoped for. As a side note, since photons travel the speed of light, due to time dilation, photons do not age (travel forward through time), a concept that has always fascinated me.

Re. a large hardon collider: That's one event I really hope I don't get to see, nor its collision products. It's bad enough with one when you slip out.

Whatever...

I just hope the LHC's powerful field doesn't align the magnetic field underneath of it, causing a magnetic pole shift. Then that whole area of Europe would have virtually no shielding from the Sun's radiation, and would fry. Oops.

@ Anonymous Coward

@Neil

You just proved yourself wrong.

Your E=mc2 is the RESULT of relativistic momentum. E=mc2 doesn't have anything to do with explaining why things can't go at the speed of light, and why? There's NOTHING about the speed of the particle in that equation. There IS in the other one you produced.

At Last!!!

Thank you, thank you thank you for publishing an article that actually explains in quite understandable language what the LHC is all about! I've been getting steadily more p*****d off over the last week at how the media has been treating this subject and missing the point entirely for juicy "end of the world" headlines. Prof Cox summed it up in the Metro beautifully, well done fella! We need more scientists like that...

This article needs to be sent to all the dailies, TV and radio news broadcasters, even Auntie Beebe (who normally has a good go at these things, to give her her due ) to give them an education in science reporting.

"Did you know that the chamber containing the ATLAS detector is so massive (35m high) that it actually has buoyancy in the Earth's crust?! It rises at a rate of 0.02mm per year, and so the floor had to be set to a 5m thickness to prevent warping.

I'm a bit of an LHC geek, despite having only a basic grasp of the physics..." ... By Alastair Smith Posted Tuesday 9th September 2008 22:32 GMT

Now that is Proper Planning and Preparation Perfectly Preventing Piss Poor Performance. By the WAI, you do Realise that CERN is Radiating Intellectual Property Energy ...... and AI 4FlowurPower2Source.... ReGenerative Enriching Source.

Which would be ....... well, Priceless Really but Virtually just Beautifully XXXXOrbitantly Expensive. A Paper Cost to Some Ne'er do wells playing Zero Sum Games for Privy Gains ... but a Bonus to Everybody Else.

Um its cool and all but...

Has no-one noticed...

... that 10 sept was just a TEST using just one beam, and no collisions??? they will not be doing a basic colllision untill it gets upto speed, in about a month.... and it may be Dec. before things really start happening...